I kept reading about how people are defending it because it will help M$ give us a better experience by watching what we play......wait a minute.....they already know what we're playing once we start playing a game.....right there.....it says blah blah blah started playing Forza 4.....what could they possibly get from watching somebody play?......that I prefer a couch over a chair?......that I like playing games in my boxorz ?.....now if you're not going to interfere and "spy", then give an option to turn it off.....don't worry, we'll turn in back on when we want

Regardless of that people are getting paranoid everywhere.
Cellphones have cameras, laptops have cameras, the street has cameras. People drive arround with GoPro's etc etc etc
Google eye is getting closer and closer.

choices choices choices bro .......cellphones/laptop have cameras?......when was the last time you heard that someone had to have their cell/web cam on in order to use it?.....can you really not tell that the cam is on on a laptop or a cell?......traffic cameras? really?......you're going to compare public property like the street to your private property which is the inside of your home?Edited by Vlasov_581 - 5/28/13 at 8:29am

Quite simply the Kinnect being always on is causing every parent I have discussed this with to embargo the purchase of an Xbox One in their homes, wake up and change this or lose market share Microsoft!

Still even if they won't spy on you, it is ridiculous to make the kinect mandatory.

+1, let alone MAKE IT so you CANT turn it off or else the console wont function. ABSOLUTELY ABSURD, that right there is the first of many deal breakers with the Xone. You cant turn the microphone off, so pointing the camera at the wall only solves 1/2 the problem.

Ok so I will give some of a reality check on these things. I will start with I don't think the Kinect should be mandatory and games cannot be re-sold on this platform. That being said there are quite a few fallacies and rampant paranoia from this stuff. I am going to present a logical thought process for you to think about.

First realize you are not special. No one is watching or listening to you. Second think about how many people are playing on a xbox throughout the entire world at any given time. How much data would that be? I promise you that would be a staggering amount of data. Moving from there how do you think that information is analyzed? Computer vision and classification. Do you have any idea how hard that is? Each room a kinect is in is a completely different environment. Object recognition rules are not universal. A person is easy to see because of two things. For the most part we all have a shape not found elsewhere. We also do this thing called moving the whole reason the thing works in the first place is because it detects movement. Get a blow up doll in front of the thing with strings to move it and the kinect will think it is a person.

I will now explain why that information is largely useless. Information the kinect could collect is a very unambiguous. It is unstructured data. That means it would be very difficult to learn from. A analogy I posted in a different thread explains the case. It would be similar to being put into the library of congress and told to learn something you didn't already know. Where would you even start? Now on the other hand you could be told to find information on how TVs work. You know what you are looking for now so that narrows your search range but it is still very difficult. You can teach a computer to identify an object from one singular image. It will get be able to find that object easily for that image. Give it another image (ie a new room) that has different light levels, orientation, and colors and what you taught the computer no longer applies. It would have to be taught again which requires human interact and supervision. See the problem?

Last thing I want to mention is called Title 3 otherwise known as the wire tapping act. Voice and video monitoring requires a super-warrant. Anything obtained without one cannot be used in court (the exception being Txt messages and emails can be used even if obtained legally).

Now how do I know these things and know why it is so difficult to do? I have worked for a three letter agency and my research deals largely with image analysis and machine learning (Ph.D. student). Plus I am using a bit of common sense. Why would anyone literally waste millions storing and attempting to data mine these things? Do you have a car, insurance, credit cards, loans, address, job, internet connection. There are much easier and better ways to learn about people with those.